Hezbollah's new museum is ghoulish

Earlier this week, I found myself standing in the courtyard of Beirut's newest museum in front of the warped propeller of a Yasur CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. The propeller, a placard helpfully explained, had been "destroyed by the resistance" during last summer's war, a fate that had also befallen the half-dozen charred Israeli military vehicles surrounding it. A group of hijab-clad women nudged me out of the way so they could snap some photos with the propeller.

The downed helicopter is on display at the Spider's Web, Hezbollah's new war museum. The free exhibition commemorates the group's "divine victory" over Israel last summer by offering up a professional and slickly curated collection of war paraphernalia--the work of over two dozen conceptual artists, graphic designers, engineers, musicians, and lighting technicians. Since opening last month, it has become this summer's hottest tourist destination, attracting, mostly by word of mouth, over 200,000 visitors. "We don't even remember the war in the Christian area where I'm from, but I felt like it is something that should not be forgotten soon," explains Danya, a 26-year-old Christian financial consultant, as she made her way into the museum past a busload of schoolchildren. "Also, I wanted to see what all my friends were talking about."...

Perhaps fearing that the deaths of just dozens of Zionists won't make enough of an impression, the Spider's Web design team has made sure that pictures of bloodied and limbless Israeli soldiers make up the largest part of the exhibit. Some are digitally altered to be surrounded by hellish flames; others are rendered with anguished faces into art deco portraits; still others are engulfed in spider webs constructed with Koranic verses. "The invincible army!" gloats one of these montages. "It's Lebanon, you fools," reads another. A Warhol-esque portrait of Nasrallah presides contentedly over the display.

The museum's main event is a sound-and-light show around Hezbollah's prized artifact--a Merkava tank bombed during the war--displayed in a recreated bomb crater lined with mannequins of (what else?) dead Israeli soldiers. Every few minutes, the lights dim for an effects-laden video extravaganza that shows the explosion of the tank, up-close shots of Hezbollah militants launching Katyusha rockets, and Hezbollah's missiles raining down on the Israeli city of Haifa. After the show, the lights come up on posters of crying Israeli soldiers